Is there a way to wipe ALL info off your PC before giving it to someone else ??? If I need some kind of software, could you give me the name of it ?? Thanks to all that help.
What kinda info the way to completley remove the info is to format your hard drive. but if your talking bout a registry cleaner just use Easy Cleaner.
Not quite Borhan. Formatting just removes the first bit of data for every file, and marks the drive empty. It's not. If you're going to get rid of the drive, you'll have to "scrub" the drive using Drive Scrubber, or other similar software titles. You could Google "complete hard drive erasing" to find what you need.
Thanks guys. I read where some will even erase recovery partitions. I don't want to do that do I ?? I made recovery discs for the PC, but will they work if the recovey partitions are lost ?? Stuff like this is outta my league. I just want to make sure I can get what came on the PC, back on the PC. I found a program called Sure Delete. Wondering if that's a good one. I found some that requires a floppy drive. I don't have one on this PC. Thanks for your help.
the only way for certain is to trash the hd. other than that fdisk to delete c: partition, make new c: partition than format. that will not stop people determined to see your info as i have ontrack easy data recovery program that recovered info that got ghosted by a freshly formated hd.
According to the NSA, a random pattern of nonsensical 1's and 0's must be written to the drive a minimum of 6 times to be unrecoverable. However, a very high powered magnet can do the same thing in a matter of minutes. It's sort of preferable to use crypto prior to formatting, as the recovered container would still be encrypted.
According to the last bit of info I read about that, unless you have access to a particle accelerator...you won't find a magnet powerful enough anywhere else. 35 pass is 5x the standard set by NSA and the US DOD. However, as ddp suggested, it's also well known that drilling about four or five holes thru the disk platters will render them unreadable by any device. It's the same as cutting up your 'copies' of CD/DVDs. Forensic scientists can piece together bits of floppy disks to read information, but they must have the entire disk to read it...drilling holes prevents that.
DDP,you said you still found data after a fresh format,how do you find all that info out?Just out of curiousity.I thought formatting & using drive scrubber(or a tool like it) erased everything.I'm still learning about computers so i'd like to know this kind of stuff.
ddp mentioned that he recovered data from a freshly "ghosted" hard drive. It is virtually impossible to retrieve data by any reasonable means if you scrub a drive with the 35 pass method...though 7 will be enough to keep most of your average hard core hackers from doing anything with it.
